What's gone wrong with Australian test cricket?

Australian cricket has been through a tough time of late. They have lost series both home and away in all forms of the game, most gut-wrenchingly, losing an Ashes series at home by a distance.

So what’s gone wrong?

Is domestic cricket Down Under failing to prepare would-be international cricketers for the step up to the international arena?

Is Australia in general just lacking talent?

The answer to all those questions is “No”. Australia are suffering from two things:

1.       Being very successful for a long period of time.

2.       Having so many great players retire at roughly the same time.

The problem with having such a successful side is that people become accustomed to success. This is not necessarily a bad thing as one must always have high expectations, but it’s almost impossible to maintain such success indefinitely. At some point there are going to be lows, and that’s when journalists start writing about a crisis in the sport. There is no crisis of course, but it’s very easy to sit on one’s laurels when success has been an expectation for such a long time, and so the other teams improve and catch up.

Australia has also had half their side retire at about the same time, and those players have to be replaced by those who are clearly not as good or better. Had they been as good or better than their predecessors, they’d have been selected. People like Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath cannot be replaced – England spent years searching for the “new Ian Botham”, a futile search as there will only ever be one.

Australian cricket fans clearly have short memories. Back in the late Eighties Australia were just as weak as they are now, but had a plan under Allan Border and ultimately it led to their world domination of the game in the Nineties and Noughties. They may have to go through the same process again.

Australia isn’t the only side who have fallen on hard times. Just look at the West Indies team nowadays compared to the teams they had in the Seventies and Eighties, teams that were almost untouchable with the likes of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards at the helm. Now they struggle to give England a good game.

What the sporting public need to remember is that success is great whilst it lasts, but it is not a given that once your team is successful, that will last forever. If that were the case sport would be very boring, in fact it wouldn’t be a contest and no-one would go and watch it.

There is nothing wrong with Australian cricket other than they haven’t got the side that they had 5 or 10 years ago, and never will have again. They have to build from scratch once again, and there will be a few poor results for a while, but eventually it will all come good and people will once more forget the troubled times.